Spirits Of The Red City ring a Silent Bell

Since Spirits Of The Red City released their sprawling orchestral debut, Hunter Moon, at the Bryant-Lake Bowl a full year ago, the eight-person collective has played only one show in town. Led by singer and songwriter Will Garrison, the band took its trumpets and cellos on the road, ambitiously hitting up both coasts in 2009. They return to the Bryant-Lake Bowl Jan. 2 with new songs and, adding to an already packed stage, a collaborative theater piece, The Silent Bell. The brainchild of Spirits' multi-instrumentalist Jason Overby and his girlfriend, theater artist Telsche Thiessen, as well as Garrison’s significant other, visual artist Lauren Treece, Silent Bell uses Spirits' music as a jumping-off point for explorations into memory and absence. The A.V. Club spoke with Garrison, Overby, and Thiessen about expanding the boundaries of art, forging new connections with an audience, and magic they don’t understand.

The A.V. Club: The Silent Bell is an abstract mix of live action, puppetry, and music, following a character loosely inspired by Spirits' lyrics. Why create a theater piece to go along with the music?

Will Garrison: I've started to see that our art is not really theater or music or whatever else we do. In a society where we are naturally becoming more individualized, I think there is something very valuable about truly and honestly connecting with people that become your family, and bringing that as an art. We try to do this in all our mediums, we try to see it as everyone there is a part of what’s happening. When you can accomplish that, when you are lucky enough to experience that, it's a really profound thing.

Jason Overby: Basically we wanted to find a way for our girlfriends to tour with us. [Laughs.] 

AVC: How has the work been divided among the different members of the group?

TT: I’ll be the director and Jason is going to be the primary actor. We're using puppets in a supplementary way; it’s mostly live action and then using small-scale puppetry to represent a dream state and to track someone's development in their subconscious. We collectively make all the design decisions, down to what the puppet is going to wear or what the main actor is going to wear, so we all sat down and brainstormed how we could best represent the emotion of [the main character's] experience in the puppet show.

AVC: How directly did the music influence the direction of The Silent Bell?

WG: We used some of our core concepts and things that are abstracted or hidden [in the songs] as a base. Jason told me to take concepts of specific songs and start internally, because I am very protective of those things, and write them out so that we could talk about them as a source of inspiration. But the theater piece is very much its own project.

JO: I like the idea of really setting up an environment [for] an audience to listen to the narratives within the music.

Telsche Thiessen: Yeah, by setting up those ideas theatrically—

JO: They can see it more clearly in our music.

AVC: What is the significance of The Silent Bell as a title?

JO: A silent bell is this inanimate thing but when it’s no longer silent there is this life and this magic in it. That's a similar theme [as in] a lot of [Spirits' songs]: this magic that we don't really understand. It's not a bell without the bell sound. We're not really people unless we are awake and alive.

AVC: How has your work with the Open Eye Figure Theatre and Bedlam Theatre been an influence on The Silent Bell?

TT: We talked with Michael Sommers [of Open Eye] quite a bit, because his puppet shows have a huge influence on us and we are using some of the ideas of his puppetry in our live action. And [Bedlam] is a huge influence—this place really forces you to re-think how you might do something based on the amount of money you have. So we've been driving through alleys and digging through Dumpsters and going through abandoned houses to find our props.  Spirits does a lot of house shows, and we've created [The Silent Bell] so that it's adaptable to any size stage. We're really excited about doing it in people's basements. The idea of presenting a new experience to punk house shows is exciting.